"Course it's right," the cop said, and something hardened in his face, as though the rightness of it had disappointed him and he had decided to hold that against Lorenz too. "You packed it. You'd know what's in it to the penny. That's not the question. The question is what it was doing coming back out of the wall."
"I told you what—"
"You told me a shelf." He put the slip in his pocket with the envelope. "Sit tight."
He shut the door.
The sound of it closing was the loudest sound Lorenz had heard all night. Then he was alone in the back of the car with the partition and the laptop glow and the purple horse, and through the windshield he could see the money spread across the hood in the white light, his money, Dorrit's money, rows of green paper lying out in the cold for anyone to see, and the cop walking back and forth beside it talking into the radio clipped at his shoulder. The windows were up. He could hear only fragments, muffled, through the glass and the partition, and the louder fragments of the radio itself, which came through the cruiser's dash speaker in bursts of static and flat dispatcher's voice.
"—check on a Dimaculangan, D-I-M—"
"—no wants, no warrants, valid Indiana—"
"—requesting a sergeant to my location, and can you see if we can get a keyholder out from Three Rivers—"
He sat with his shoulder against the door. The right cuff, the one that had been loosened a click, did not hurt. The left one did. He thought about Kiet, awake on his couch with his sick baby and his phone, waiting for a text. He thought about Analyn on the third floor of the nursing home on Fairfield, turning an old man in his bed every two hours so his skin would not break down, and what she would say, and what she would not say, and how she would look at him. He thought about Paolo, who was thirteen and who had asked him just last week, at dinner, out of nowhere, whether it was true that if a cop stopped you, you should keep your hands on the steering wheel even if your nose itched, because a kid at school said so, and Lorenz had said yes, it was true, and Analyn had looked at him across the table. He thought about Dorrit tearing up the paper with the combination on it and putting the pieces in her coat pocket.
He thought about his mother on the quay in her yellow blouse, not waving.
And then he thought, because his mind did this to him when it was frightened, it went to the kitchen: the shelf. The bright thing in the chute. He had known it with his hands before he knew it with his head. Brushed steel. Rounded corners. The flat stamped lip running around the top edge. He saw it again now the way he had seen it with the flashlight shining down past his own bag, and he knew what it was, he had known since the instant he saw it, and he had been too frightened to say it. It was a hotel pan. A third pan, from the look of the width. The shallow kind, two and a half inches. The same pan that was sitting in the lowboy at Baird's right now holding the cut chives. You could buy them at any restaurant supply on the planet for eleven dollars. There was no such thing as a kitchen without them.